Redefining historical mothers

Summary

HistoryExtra Podcast Episode Summary

"Redefining Historical Mothers"

Date: May 19, 2026
Host: Lauren Good
Guest: Eleanor Cleghorn (author of A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering)

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Episode Overview

This episode investigates the role of motherhood in history, moving beyond its traditional relegation to the margins to explore its cultural, social, and political significance. Historian Eleanor Cleghorn speaks with Lauren Good about her new book, which traces stories of mothering across centuries and challenges the assumption that motherhood is simply "expected" rather than extraordinary. The discussion highlights objects, rituals, individual women, and notable shifts in attitudes towards mothers and maternal identity.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Impulse Behind Reclaiming the History of Mothering

• Motherhood as Sidelined Yet Foundational ([01:26]–[04:10])
  • Eleanor Cleghorn: “There would be no history without mothers, literally. But yet it’s often sidelined as not really the stuff of history, because it’s so expected.” ([03:10])
  • The book aims to center the experiences of mothers and the broader ideas surrounding motherhood, illustrating how these intersect and evolve across eras.
• Physicians’ Beliefs and Societal Assumptions
  • Medical and societal traditions cast women's biological role as motherhood, shaping expectations and limiting women’s roles in history.

2. The Symbolism and Rituals around Motherhood

• The Clay Boat Votive (Ancient Crete) ([04:20]–[08:27])
  • An object discovered in Crete—a boat with a fetus and women figurines—serves as a metaphor for the journey of childbirth and the cultural reverence for mothers in ancient times.
  • Cleghorn: “Vested in this tiny, beautiful object are so many stories and histories, both personal and wider...” ([07:55])
• Medieval Rituals: The ‘Delayed Birth’ Charm ([08:59]–[11:55])
  • Recited prayers or rituals aimed at aiding birth or helping women cope with loss highlight how communities sought control over maternal danger.
  • Notable ritual: a grieving mother wraps soil from her child’s grave in black wool and gives it to a merchant to remove her grief—a moving communal custom.

3. Maternal Grief and Emotional Intensity across Eras

• Elizabeth Jocelyn’s Legacy ([12:17]–[16:07])
  • In the 17th century, Jocelyn wrote a letter to her unborn child out of fear she would die in childbirth—a prediction that came true.
  • Quote: “Her foreboding was so strong that she bought a winding sheet to wrap her own corpse in and hid it.” ([14:20])
  • The preservation and rarity of such firsthand maternal writings prompt reflection on the broader silences in the historical record.

4. Challenges Faced by Maternal Voices in History

• Scarcity of Writings by Mothers ([16:07]–[17:07])
  • Due to low literacy rates and lack of preservation, stories like Jocelyn’s survive mainly by accident.
  • Cleghorn: “Buried within that legacy is just this glimmer that opens up for me as a sort of key to thinking about how other women might have written about their maternal experiences...” ([16:54])

5. Louise Bourgeois: Midwifery as Female Authority

• Louise Bourgeois’ Advocacy ([19:57]–[24:04])
  • Pioneering 17th-century French midwife, Bourgeois published influential medical texts and fought for female-led birthing care.
  • Cleghorn: “She firmly believed that all women deserved thorough, careful, kind, compassionate, expert care when they were becoming mothers.” ([21:31])
  • Fought incursions by male physicians into childbirth spaces, championing hands-on, experiential female knowledge over male-dominated, theoretical discourse.
• Maintaining Women's Space in Childbirth ([24:04]–[25:59])
  • Anecdote: Bourgeois smuggled a male surgeon in so discreetly that the birthing woman never knew a man had entered, preserving female space and privacy.

6. The Communal Nature of Childbirth

• Historical Social Birthing Practices ([25:59]–[28:43])
  • Childbirth was often a communal event attended by female relatives and friends—a contrast to today’s more private births.
  • For privileged women, lying-in periods became social rites, celebrated with gifts and gatherings, but also offered respite from daily responsibilities.

7. Joy and Grief in the Histories of Motherhood

• The Joys of Mothering ([28:43]–[30:19])
  • Despite sources focusing on the dangers, Cleghorn reminds that joy in motherhood is also found—though harder to recover from medicalized historical sources.
  • Cleghorn: “You have to search a bit harder, but it is there.” ([29:57])

8. Case Studies: Women Who Redefined Motherhood

A. Hildegard of Bingen ([30:19]–[34:29])

• Medieval abbess and polymath, Hildegard wrote medical texts that transformed Eve’s biblical story from a tale of original sin to one of extraordinary generative potential.
  • Cleghorn: “For her, Eve was not a temptress…but the sort of first mother...holding the possibility of all other humans.” ([32:27])
  • Reclaimed menstrual blood as an “exuberant force”—a unique, positive spin in her era.

B. Mary Wollstonecraft ([34:29]–[39:04])

• Mother of feminist thought who linked motherhood to women’s citizenship, independence, and fulfillment.
  • Private letters detail her maternal fears and hopes—offering a rare personal window into her thinking.
  • Cleghorn: “She really laid the groundwork for thinking of mothering not just as what women do in the home, but what women do in the world.” ([37:04])

C. Sojourner Truth ([39:04]–[42:32])

• Formerly enslaved, Truth championed both women’s rights and abolition. She legally fought for her son’s custody, asserting a Black mother's right to her children in a legal system that denied it.
  • Cleghorn: “Her identity as a mother...had been denied to her while she was enslaved and which she fought to re obtain for herself when she was a free woman.” ([40:12])
  • Truth exposed racist ideologies that denied Black women’s capacity for maternal love and actively reclaimed her rights and narrative.

9. The Universality and Complexity of Motherhood

• Mothering as Universal but Context-Specific ([42:32]–[44:18])
  • Societal and legal expectations create differing experiences for mothers; identities are individually shaped and always intersected with dominant cultural narratives.

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Memorable Quotes (with Timestamps)

• “There would be no history without mothers, literally.”
  — Eleanor Cleghorn ([03:10])
• “Vested in this tiny, beautiful object are so many stories and histories, both personal and wider...”
  — Eleanor Cleghorn ([07:55])
• “The maintenance of propriety between a birthing woman and a man is really quite extraordinary. The choreographic lengths that we’ve gone to...”
  — Eleanor Cleghorn ([25:40])
• “Buried within that legacy is just this glimmer that opens up for me...as a sort of key to thinking about how other women might have written about their maternal experiences.”
  — Eleanor Cleghorn ([16:54])
• “Mothering is at once this hugely important practice and experience, an event within history. But it's also what makes history.”
  — Eleanor Cleghorn ([45:50])

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Important Segment Timestamps

• [01:26] The book’s central intention and historical context of motherhood
• [04:20] The story of the clay votive boat from ancient Crete
• [08:59] Medieval birth rituals – the ‘delayed birth’ charm
• [12:17] Emotional realities of maternal grief: Elizabeth Jocelyn’s legacy
• [19:57] Louise Bourgeois and her defense of female midwifery
• [25:59] The communal aspects of childbirth in history
• [30:41] Hildegard of Bingen’s re-casting of Eve and women’s bodies
• [34:39] Mary Wollstonecraft’s integration of motherhood and feminism
• [39:12] Sojourner Truth’s activism and maternal struggle
• [42:47] The individuality and universality of maternal experience
• [44:29] How the book seeks to reshape our view of mothers in history

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Tone and Language

The episode’s tone is empathetic, inquisitive, and reflective. Cleghorn’s language blends academic insight with vivid, accessible storytelling; notable are the moments of awe and affective emphasis on the importance of recovering lost or overlooked maternal histories.

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Takeaway

This episode reveals that history has long underplayed the extraordinary, multifaceted realities of motherhood. By recentering mothers’ experiences, objects, and writings—whether through ritual, activism, or philosophical inquiry—Cleghorn demonstrates that mothering is both a universal anchor and an individually complex journey, deserving of far more attention in the historical record and cultural imagination.

Transcript

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[Podcast Host Lauren Good]

Motherhood has long been considered as something expected rather than extraordinary. However, in this episode of the History Extra podcast, Eleanor Cleghorn explains to Lauren Good that there are many stories throughout history that demonstrate that this isn't the case, from pregnant women predicting their futures to midwives questioning the status quo.

[Interviewer Lauren Good]

Hello Eleanor. Thank you so much for joining me today.

[Historian Eleanor Cleghorn]

Hi Lauren, thank you so much for having me.

[Interviewer Lauren Good]

We're talking today about your new book, A Woman's Reclaiming Radical History of Mothering. Can we start with a pretty sizable question? What was your main intention in writing this book?

[Historian Eleanor Cleghorn]

Well, this book or the initial idea for this book or impulse for this book really came when I was writing and researching my first book, Unwell Women, which is a history of women's relationship with medicine over its long history, the way that women have been treated by doctors and by medical thinkers and authors over medicine's long history. And one of the reasons often touted by physicians and doctors throughout history about not only women's illnesses, but why women have to have certain kinds of lives is that they are destined to bear children, be mothers, raise children, exist in the home. So not only were women's illnesses often pivoted back to their reproductive organs or their assumed reproductive function, there was also this huge kind of over overarching social narrative around women's place being in the home, women's social and biological role being motherhood, and the ways that those kind of predestined ideas sort of framed other kinds of thinking throughout history about, you know, who women are, what their bodies are for, what women should do in society and in the world. So I was really thinking about motherhood as it is, you know, one of the most defining roles in women's lives throughout history. And often motherhood, it struck me, was something that was so expected of women, seemingly so ordinary and commonplace. That's what women do. Women have babies, women raise children. But it really is the most extraordinary work that people do, bearing and raising children. There's nothing commonplace or ordinary about it, but I think we tend to think of motherhood in history as being something that's sort of confined to the sidelines. We understand that mothering is so vital and so crucial. You know, the perpetuation of our lives depends on it. There would be no history without mothers, literally. But yet it's often sidelined as not really the stuff of history, because it's so expected. So I wanted to tell a history of women through the lens of experiences of mothering and wider, broader social, cultural and political ideas about motherhood, and show how those two sort of elements have bumped up against each other and how what it's meant, you know, over the centuries to be a mother.

[Interviewer Lauren Good]

As you said, this is over centuries. You cover a huge span of history in the book. Was there any object or story that particularly touched you during your research?

[Historian Eleanor Cleghorn]

The book begins with a small handmade clay votive object that was discovered in an archaeological dig of a cave in a fishing village on the southern coast of Crete. And this object is a small handmade red clay boat. And when this particular cave was discovered and excavated in the 1970s, it was found alongside many other votive objects, ranging from other handmade clay models to pieces of jewellery, to household objects that had been assumed to be dedicated in this cave in ritual acts. And the boat, when it was discovered, was also found to have an accompanying tiny little clay model resembling a human foetus and tiny little female sailors who were notable because they had their one arm raised and a breast bed, which is a sort of goddess motif, quite common. So the archaeologists put this votive object back together and were able to ascertain that the boat had been made with the little fetus passenger inside. And at one point in time, it had a small crew of women sailors on the gunwales of the boat. And it was dated to about the 9th century BCE. And the site of this cave in Crete was thought to be, or noted to once have been, a ritual site for the worship of a birth goddess called Eolethea, who appears in Greek mythology. She's honoured in the Olympic pantheon as a minor goddess during classical. In classical Greece and classical Greek rituals, an important goddess for women who was honored and it's thought that she was honoured in this cave in Crete. And when I was reading the catalogue, the sort of excavation and exhibition catalogue pertaining to this particular dig, which was published by the Herakleon Museum in Crete, there were other votives that seemed to be allusions to birth as well. So birthing figures with caregivers, even tiny swaddled babies, women breastfeeding. But this particular object, the boat with the foetus, really struck me, firstly because it's so beautiful and so strange, but also because it linked back to an even earlier history when metaphors of sailing and rough seas and captained journeys were used often in birth imagery. So verses that might have been recited during labor to keep women safe. So the idea of a boat representing a pregnant woman who is carrying her precious cargo, her fetus, across the rough waters of labour and birth, being captained or steered towards life by these tiny little caregiving sailors who were thought to represent midwives, possibly goddesses, possibly a combination of the two things. It's an object that was handmade, that speaks to so many cultural references, but also to this unknown maker who existed so many centuries ago, who is petitioning for her own safety, perhaps. Perhaps the safety of a loved one. We just can't tell. But vested in this tiny, beautiful object are so many stories and histories, both, you know, personal and sort of wider, that it really fascinated me and it really gave shape, actually, to how the book continued, or to my thinking, throughout the book. So the book opens with a story that I kind of ascribed to the boat, and there was just something about this beautiful, curious object and the unknowingness around its making, but also the way that it speaks to deeper histories of pregnancy, birth and mothering, that I just adore it. It's a really beautiful and curious piece.

[Interviewer Lauren Good]

I found that part of your book particularly touching as well. And it also shows you argue in the book that in this case, motherhood wasn't an expected thing. There was an appreciation that this was, you know, a huge thing to go through. We see the presence of ritual centuries later as well. You described the highly ritualistic nature of motherhood in the absence of healthcare in the Middle Ages and discussed something called delayed birth. What was this?

[Historian Eleanor Cleghorn]

So delayed birth was one of what are called the metrical charms, which were a set of. Of, I guess medical prayers is one way of describing them in the early Middle Ages, which could be recited to aid all sorts of things. So there was a metrical charm for protection on journeys. There was a metrical charm to get rid of A swarm of bees. There were several metrical charms about protecting one's cows or finding your cows if they were stolen, I think. But one of these charms is called for delayed birth. And it's a beautiful set of birthing rituals, not just around birth, but also around the hope for a child. And they are supposed to be recited by a woman who has experienced trauma and tragedy in childbirth, so perhaps has lost a child, or by a woman who hopes to again become pregnant and give birth safely after experiencing such a loss. And they include some really beautiful instructions and really curious instructions, including to ensure that you become pregnant and have a. Have a healthy baby, you have to step over your husband while he's lying in bed asleep. So you have to do a sort of elaborate stepping sequence and make sure that your husband doesn't wake up while reciting your intentions to become pregnant again and have a healthy child. But there are some aspects of a delayed birth that are truly just very poignant. And one of the sequences involves a woman going to the grave of her dead child and taking some of the soil and wrapping the soil in some black wool. And then the ritual was completed. If she gave this black wool containing the soil from her child's grave to a traveling merchant, who would then take it away from the area where she lived to symbolize her grief and the threat of another loss being taken far away from her. So there was also a sort of a little collaborative element as well in this that the merchant would then, you know, leave town, taking with him the grief and the danger. And we don't know, again, how these rituals were performed by whom. We know they exist and were written down. But to imagine how they were performed and to imagine these. Were they written down? You know, were they remembered by rote? It speaks to so many possibilities that we can't know for sure. But what we can know is that there's the existence of this particular charm. So again, we can know that there was a real sense of a necessity to create practices around mothering and childbirth that could bring some safety, bring some degree of protection.

[Interviewer Lauren Good]

It is so poignant. And these rituals also highlight the shockwaves these experiences did create. I feel, we assume sometimes that because, you know, young death was more usual during these periods, it wouldn't have been perhaps as shocking. But it was, of course, still felt hugely.

[Historian Eleanor Cleghorn]

It was felt so hugely. And when I think back at the book now, one of the things that is a really a recurring theme, sadly, is maternal grief, because I think it was a popular assumption for a while that Parents in history, especially in the Middle Ages, didn't really love their children in the way that we do today because lives were so precarious and short. But the evidence to the contrary, I mean, the practices of active grieving and mourning that have been documented, preserved, transcribed, that we can access today, are very prevalent. One of my favourite people favorite mothers in the book is an English noblewoman called Elizabeth Jocelyn, and she got married in the 17th century to a nobleman. They were living very happily together on the estate he inherited from his father, but they didn't get pregnant immediately. And Elizabeth was really longing for a child and her marriage was a happy one, and she became pregnant. And when she felt her baby quicken for the first time, which means the first felt movements of a fetus that could be felt by the mother, at the same time, she felt her potential child quicken, she had this incredible sense of foreboding about her own life and had this ominous fear that she would die in childbirth or just after. So in order to perhaps process this or express this fear, Elizabeth wrote a legacy for her unborn child. Now, the idea of the mother's legacy became very popular during the early modern period as a form of conduct writing. And Elizabeth Joslyn's legacy is both a set of instructions to her husband about how their child should be raised if she were to lose her life, but also a set of guidance or, you know, moral lessons for her child that come uniquely from Elizabeth as a mother. But it's incredibly beautiful because Elizabeth writes as if from the grave and she says, you know, it must be very strange for you, my child, to be reading these lines from, you know, a mother who is now departed. So it's very. It's really poignant, it's very evocative, as if she's sort of haunting us in her life. I mean, her foreboding was so strong that she bought a winding sheet to wrap her own corpse in and hid it. She was so sure that she would lose her life, and she did lose her life in childbirth. And she gave birth to a daughter who was healthy and, well, who was left with her, you know, her mother's legacy, which is these pages that she had, I think, hidden in her desk and ended up being published by a priest friend as a sort of form of, you know, maternal literature, maternal moral instruction. So it's an extraordinary story. But the idea, again, of Elizabeth Joslyn feeling this much anticipated quickening of her much wanted baby, only to be so struck by the sense for immortality, it was almost sort of too much to write about. But the fact that she left this document of something that was at once so intimate but at the same time so demonstrative of maternal authority in the early modern period was just extraordinary to me.

[Interviewer Lauren Good]

Her certainty is so shocking and extraordinary. And we also don't have that much writing from mothers, do we? It wasn't common for mothers or women in that field to write, write about their experiences.

[Historian Eleanor Cleghorn]

That's so true. One of the questions that I'm asked when I've talked about this book is, okay, so motherhood wasn't deemed a sort of major topic of traditional historytelling. And women, the ones doing the mothering, were so often denied the privilege of literacy and learning. And if they were, it's not their writings that have been preserved and that have survived today. So we have Elizabeth's writings by luck, really. She hid her legacy in her desk. She didn't intend it to be made public. It was found by a priest friend published. So series of sort of happy accidents mean that we have it. But buried within that legacy is just this glimmer that opens up for me as a sort of key to thinking about how other women might have written about their maternal experiences had they had that opportunity.

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[Interviewer Lauren Good]

another woman who does write of her experiences and her work is Louise Bourgeois, the midwife who just absolutely fascinated me. Could we talk about what sort of role she played in her life?

[Historian Eleanor Cleghorn]

So Louise Bourgeois was a French midwife of the 17th century who helped women of the French royal court give birth. She was one of the most esteemed and renowned midwives in France in the early modern period. And she was also, I think, the first, at least very high up there, the first midwives to write her own medical discourse, her own gynecological and midwifery discourse. So she wrote a fantastic selection of writings called Diverse Observations, which were about her experiences as a midwife. But there were also sets of guidelines for other midwives to follow about how to help women deliver, how to care for them during pregnancy, how to look after them during the period of lying, in which were the days, about the 40 days or so after a baby had been born were women rested? And Louise Bourgeois was truly extraordinary as a writer not least because when she was writing her case studies, she attended many different kinds of women. She was court midwife, but she didn't believe that her services should be reserved only for the aristocracy. She firmly believed that all women deserved thorough, careful, kind, compassionate, expert care when they were becoming mothers. And this was something she really pushed for in her writings. And I guess what we would call her today is a maternal health activist. Because what she really wanted to do was educate and empower other maternal caregivers of midwives and women themselves to understand the physiological nature of birth and to be strengthened in that knowledge, you know, and it's a knowledge is power situation as far as Louise Bourgeois is concerned. What also makes Louise Bourgeois so fascinating is that she was defending her profession. The women led profession of midwifery against the beginnings of the incursion of male physicians and surgeons into the space of childbirth. And this happened a little bit earlier in France than it did in England. So at the time that Louise Bourgeois was working, some of the wealthier female patrons in Paris were being attended by male surgeons. And Louise Bourgeois thought this was a real invasion, not only of women's privacy and modesty. So that's the birthing women's privacy and modesty, but also into the profession that really belonged, knowledge wise and practice wise, as far as she was concerned, to women. And so she spoke out in defence of her profession often. And she did so in a way that really privileged what male physicians often denigrated women for, which was having experiential, you know, body based knowledge rather than scientific and anatomical learning, which was the province of male physicians. Often women were not permitted to study anatomy and the ways that men's were, and certainly not permitted to wield surgical tools in the way that men were. Louise Bourgeois was a real advocate for women's medical education. She wanted women to be able to study the anatomy of the uterus. She thought it was crucially important for saving the lives of birthing women. And she left us with this just incredible legacy of writings. And she was exceptionally influential on other midwives later in the early modern period, who again, were defending their profession against men like the Chamberlain family of male midwives. So, yeah, she was really, really extraordinary figure and I can't recommend her writings enough for anyone interested in the history of birth and mothering.

[Interviewer Lauren Good]

A story I found particularly impressive about Louise was that she was so focused on keeping this that she believed, you know, should be occupied by women, that she managed to smuggle a male obstetrician in when he was needed without the

[Historian Eleanor Cleghorn]

birthing mother even realising this is such an amazing story. So in the early modern period, most often male surgeons were only called in in times of extreme emergency, if a woman was, say, giving birth at home in her birthing chamber. A different story if less privileged women were giving birth in the hospital setting. But generally speaking, birth was still at that time, a women's domain. But there were situations where they might require the intervention of a surgeon. And Louise tells this story of how she was delivering a friend of hers and they needed a surgical intervention they called a male surgeon. But Louise was so worried that her friend would just be devastated to know that a man had been in the room while she was so exposed and vulnerable, that Louise contrived to have this man sort of slip in and kind of go, like under the covers and kind of do what he needed to do and slip out. And her patient never knew, this is how she tells it, never even knew that he'd been there. And afterwards, you know, was able to just, she says, you know, give birth as nature intended. So she was not sort of affronted or scared by the presence of a man in the room. I mean, you read stories as well about men doing their sort of things, surgeries on birthing women, or surgical interventions with, you know, curtains up so that they're not even looking while they do. I mean, the maintenance of propriety between a birthing woman and a man is really quite extraordinary. The choreographic lengths that we've gone to to preserve this propriety, there is very much this.

[Interviewer Lauren Good]

Yeah, preserving of the female space. And it also struck me when reading your book, that whereas now we view birth as a very intimate, perhaps closed off event, when I was reading excerpts, it feels like an event. In a lot of cases of women gathering together, it feels very much like a community.

[Historian Eleanor Cleghorn]

It really was a social and communal event from ancient and classical Greece and Rome, where you would have a midwife and possibly female relatives. And then Soranus, who was the Imperial Roman gynecologist, who left us with lots of instructions for female midwives. He talks about how, ideally, a birthing woman would also be attended by three of her friends who would be there just to support her and would offer both emotional and physical support, so they might gather round her and hold her. So you've got a midwife, probably an assistant, three friends, also probably relatives. So, yeah, the busyness or the sort of collectivity and community around birth, I think it is very different, a closed off space in terms of a gendered space, but definitely far more Social, both during births and during the lion in period as well. And in the early modern period, for at least for wealthier, more privileged women, that period of lying in. In which a woman was, you know, shedding the remains of her kind of blood and birthing fluid, the point where she was sort of physically cleansed of the remnants of giving birth, but it was also a time of rest for her and a time of sociality and gathering. And for more privileged women, there might be gift giving and bedside feasts. I mean, it sounds actually quite exhausting, I think, the social responsibilities of giving birth. In the early modern period, it sounds like a lot to contend with, but it was an important rite of passage. And for women who could be celebrated in that way by their community of women, a very. Yeah, a very different culture indeed than the one we have today. But at the same time, you know, more time to just exist in that space of new motherhood, purely in that space of new motherhood. If at least for wealthier, more privileged women, this would mean not having to do the running of the household, this would mean being separated from other kind of marital and domestic responsibilities, which is something that we don't have now, or we especially not in our culture.

[Interviewer Lauren Good]

Your book also really made me reflect on the fact. I know, of course, we've discussed a lot about the dangers involved in birth and the warranted fear that women did have surrounding the process of bringing a child into the world. But there were, of course, many cases that were joyful. And I don't think we really think about that when we consider this in history.

[Historian Eleanor Cleghorn]

That's true. And what's sad, really, about looking back over the history of motherhood is that it often is the grief and the loss and the danger that sort of rises to the top. Because we tend to get many of our source, much of our source material about, especially about pregnancy and birth from medical discourse, from medical texts, which always overemphasize the possible dangers and the possible risks and the ways that they can try and be mitigated. But the joy, the concept of giving birth and taking joy in one's children is so present throughout history. And women's sort of fight for the right to do that has also been exceptionally important, especially in the later centuries, as, you know, as we move towards the present. So, yeah, it's a sad fact that, you know, when we dwell in the history of motherhood, we are going to come up against tragedy. But the joy of what it means to give birth and the joy of what it means to relate to one's child and to one's, you know, newfound identity as a mother as well, I think is really there. You have to search a bit harder, but it is there.

[Interviewer Lauren Good]

Now, there are a few amazing women that you cover in the book that I would love to discuss. The first is Hildegard of Bingen. She's a hugely influential figure and you say that she countered the more misogynistic theories promoted by Catholic doctrines surrounding women's bodies and motherhood. How does she write differently of Eve in their creation story, for example?

[Historian Eleanor Cleghorn]

So Hildegard of Bingham, easily one of the most remarkable women in history, this incredible polymath, incredible thinker about both religion and spirituality and our human place in the world. She's an incredible figure. And amongst her very many achievements is that she wrote two medical books. One Causes and Cures, which was about all the different ailments of the human body, and one called Physica, which was about the properties, healing properties of plants and earthly elements and animal substances. And within those books, I think it's in Causes and Cures, Hildegard ruminates on the idea of Eve. Now, of course, Eve very present in biblical stories as the reason for the unleashing of original sin in the world. And Eve was really a motif very present in the cultural imagination around birth and motherhood, because Eve's transgression, her fervour to learn, resulted in all women being punished by God to suffer in childbirth and maternity. That was one of the ways mortal women had to repent for original sin. So the motif of Eve, or the story of Eve, is very wrapped up in, I think, feelings of shame and sort of degradation around birthing and parturian and maternal bodies. Now, Hildegard didn't necessarily depart from certain ideas about women's weakness and women's subordination to men in her writings, but what she did do was write in this very celebratory and actually quite empowering, empowering way about what the female body was in terms of the kind of wider cosmos. And for her, Eve was not a temptress or a deceitful, you know, knowledge wanter. She was the sort of first mother. And she was holding the possibility of all other humans, all, all of her other children in her body, like a sort of constellation, which is really a beautiful and extraordinary way to write about Eve. Hildegard also wrote about menstrual blood, again, something loaded with taboo and disgust and revulsion. In the Middle Ages, she wrote about women's menstrual blood as being a sort of exuberant force, I think, were the words she used that enabled women to bring forth offspring as the trees bring forth fruits and leaves. So this idea of abundance and bringing forth and generative possibility in a reading of menstrual blood, which isn't something that happens very often in medieval medical discourse at all, she was a woman of God. She was a Benedictine abbess. She had never experienced physical maternity. So for her to be so attuned and so sort of sympathetic to the body experiences of women who were living their lives outside of the church is again extraordinary. And as an abbess, she did have experience with tending to people who might have turned up to the monastery infirmary, which often acted as charitable hospitals for those who needed it most. So she would have come into contact with pregnant women with new mothers, maybe at the infirmary. So there is that hands on knowledge as well. But to write particularly about Eve, to sort of recast Eve as this first mother, it's a really beautiful piece of writing. I think. Causes and Cures is one of my favorite texts to revisit, and I recommend that one too.

[Interviewer Lauren Good]

Another figure I'd love to discuss is Mary Wollstonecraft, who will be a familiar name to many. What does she do to change perceptions of motherhood?

[Historian Eleanor Cleghorn]

Mary Wollstonecraft really centred motherhood in her writings in a way that I hadn't necessarily thought about before I started writing this book. Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother, often referred to as the mother of modern feminist thought, who wrote in her A Vindication of the Rights of Women, about how women's educational and economic empowerment and independence would lead to their sort of betterment as citizens and enable them to come into their full humanity as people, not just as appendages to men as wives and mothers. But in her book, motherhood is very present as an important role for women in society, not just for women in the home, but for women as social intellectual creatures, as political participants. Their roles as mothers is really important in Mary Wollstonecraft's philosophy and in Mary's own life, of course. She had her own maternal experiences, which are well documented in her letters. She was a single mother, she had a child outside of marriage. She shared letters with the father of her child that really give us again this hugely intimate insight into how she felt about her pregnant body, into the sensations that she was experiencing, into her fears, into her hopes, and then when her baby was born, about her experiences of breastfeeding. And so when we look again, or when I looked again at Mary's published writings, especially her political writings, and then at the same time, thinking about her lived experiences of maternity and her grappling with what it meant to be a mother in this. This very unconventional way for the 18th century, you know, to have a baby while she wasn't married to the father of the baby. It just really shone this really important new light for me on the significance of Mary's private maternal experiences and her public facing work. Because, of course, the letters that have survived, now that we can read, they were not public at the time. She was writing her things like Vindications and Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, which also talks a lot about what it means to mother, you know, what it means to raise children, what it means to mother them. So having this gift now of being able to read about Mary Wollstonecraft's private experiences of motherhood and sort of see how those are imbued into her writing is really fascinating. And I think she really did set up something that became hugely important in the 19th century in the concerted movement towards women's rights in the UK and the us especially, the idea that mothering wasn't just this silent, secluded, you know, private domestic practice that women just got on with behind the scenes, that it was central to who they were as people in the world. And that's what I think was her main. She really laid the groundwork for thinking of mothering and not just what women do in the home, but what women do in the world.

[Interviewer Lauren Good]

I hadn't really considered Mary Wollstonecraft commenting on motherhood before reading your book. It wasn't something I really associated with her.

[Historian Eleanor Cleghorn]

I know, I think, which is really interesting, considering that she is a maternal figure in terms of mothering feminism into being. And yet I similarly hadn't really thought about her as necessarily a figure in the history of motherhood before. But when she talks about how, especially if women are able to have access to economic independence, if they're able to be educated, how that will make them better mothers, because it will fulfill them in the world in a way that being a man's wife can never do, and that it will improve not only their relationships with their husbands, but also how they feel about their own children. I mean, it seems very commonplace now. Of course, mothers should never just be mothers, like lives of the mind. We know how important all that is. But then, you know, this was radical thinking in the 18th century. The women's perspective and significance in the world could be widened through their maternal roles if they were also able to think for themselves. It's radical stuff.

[Interviewer Lauren Good]

The final woman I wanted to mention, Eleanor, is Sojourner Truth. What did her contribution to changing perceptions involve?

[Historian Eleanor Cleghorn]

So Sojourner Truth was a formerly enslaved woman who escaped from slavery in upstate New York In I think, 1827 with her infant daughter Sophia on her arm. And she escaped slavery. She was supposed to serve out terms of indenture because this happened after the Emancipation Proclamation or the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation. But her owner, the man that owned her and also owned her children, wouldn't let her go at the time he agreed to let her go. So she left of her own accord. And Sojourner Truth gave birth to several children while enslaved. She did not necessarily have a choice about this because the children of enslaved women were also viewed as property of slave owners and not of their own mothers. Sojourner Truth became one of the most important figures in civil rights and women's activism. She was hugely important figure in the abolition of chattel slavery. She shared her narrative, which told her own story in her own words of what happened to her throughout her life in slavery. In terms of motherhood, one of the most important sort of facets of Sojourner Truth's activism was her identity as a mother, an identity that had been denied to her while she was enslaved and which she fought to re obtain for herself when she was a free woman. And Soja Natruce actually took a white man, a slave owning man, to court to sue for the return of her five year old son Peter, who had been illegally taken out of the state of New York and sold away. She successfully won a case and regained custody of her child Peter, which is a tremendous and unprecedented win for a woman, especially for a formerly enslaved woman, a black woman. And in Sojourner Truth's narrative, she talks often about how for white women at the time in the 19th century, being a mother was very sacred. It was, you know, a God given role. Maternal love was really sort of lionized at that point in the culture, but for white women, not for black women, not for formerly enslaved women. And so she really illuminated and exposed these horrible rhetorics and myths around how enslaved women did not have the capacity to love their children, how they didn't have maternal instinct, all these sort of awful fallacies perpetuated by racist anthropologists and scientists. So she really countered that. So for a woman like her to take on that sort of breadth of activist work and at the same time to speak to experiences that left her exceptionally vulnerable and to assert again and again the strength of her identity as a mother and her right to mother her children is really really inspiring. And her narrative is an exceptional look into the strength of maternal feeling at a time when that feeling and that right of feeling was really denied to enslaved women like Sojourner.

[Interviewer Lauren Good]

I think when you look at all the women we've talked about in this interview and all of their experiences, it shows that motherhood is so universal, but it's also so altered depending on so many different contexts.

[Historian Eleanor Cleghorn]

It really, really is. And as we travel through history and we look at some of these imposed cultural, social, political ideas around what motherhood is, they always send out this sort of universal message that mothers should be angels in the house. For example, during the Victorian era, mothers should be loving their children unconditionally. Mothers are, you know, these silent, serene figures who exist sort of beatifically through their children and husbands. These are these kind of overarching narratives imposed upon mothers. But yes, as you say, mothers are not monolithic. And while every mother is sort of laboring under these expectations and ideologies imposed upon them by dominant culture, by religion, by medicine, by the law, every experience of mothering is so individual and so specific and really undocumentable in that way. The emotions, the sense of what it means for an individual woman to become a mother is something that's incredibly hard to capture historically. I mean, that's what sort of compelled me to write this, and I hope I've managed to capture at least a few traces of what it really felt like for individual women to mother. And it's impossible to do justice to all the different shades and variations of maternal experience and feeling. But the fact that we have any of it to look at today is, I think, just a really wonderful thing.

[Interviewer Lauren Good]

Finally, Eleanor, how would you like people's knowledge to be grown or altered? After reading your book and the experiences that you have captured in it, I

[Historian Eleanor Cleghorn]

think one of the things I was really trying to counter in this book was the idea, often perpetuated by male dominated forms of knowledge and power, that because women are mothers, because women are destined to be mothers, they are exempted from the world around them. And what I would really like this book to introduce the idea of is that mothering has always been the way that women have found their way into the world, you know, throughout history. At every. Every point in our documented history, we can see mothers asserting their identity, insisting on their own culture, inscribing themselves into history. And this happens in large ways, such as during the movement for women's rights and the ensuing feminist movement, where women were writing about mothering, they were thinking differently about mothering and this was leading to shifts in policy. So it happens in huge ways. It also happens in small ways, like the making of a votive object. To resist the possibility of one's own death. Death to insist on the vitality of one's own being. And I just think mothering is an endlessly fascinating source of historical insight. To go into history through the practice that is at the very foundation of all history is, to me, it's a way that is very human. And I hope that that's what we can take away, that mothering is at once this hugely important practice and experience, an event within history. But it's also what makes history.

[Podcast Host Lauren Good]

That was Eleanor Cleghorn, a historian of feminist visual culture and history, talking to Lauren Good. Eleanor's latest book, A Woman's Work, Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering, is out now.

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